


Reversings, or as a martyr at the stake renouncing self

by midrashic



Series: Returns, or love's hourly sacraments [1]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Beach Divorce (X-Men), Dark Charles Xavier, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:13:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23755174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: The last thing Jean expects when she opens the door after Erik has been taken is to find the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants--Xavier himself--in the doorway.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Series: Returns, or love's hourly sacraments [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734958
Comments: 63
Kudos: 151
Collections: X-Salon Challenge Works





	Reversings, or as a martyr at the stake renouncing self

**Author's Note:**

  * For [librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata/gifts).



1980.

The last thing Jean expects when she opens the door after Erik has been taken is to find the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the doorway.

Xavier is flanked by his lieutenants, Azazel the teleporter and the girl they call Storm, who is only a hair older than Jean but who has been fighting on the side of the Brotherhood for years because of her tremendous and frightening power. _Omega-level,_ the adults whisper when Storm is on TV and they think Jean and Kurt and Scott are elsewhere. They say the same thing about Jean, when they think she’s not listening. 

Jean is grateful every day that Mr. Erik is the one who came to find her after her mother died and her father disowned her and not Charles Xavier.

Jean is only twelve, but she’s ready to defend her home. She readies her telekinesis. Erik taught her how to throw knives, how to feel them out with her mind and control their trajectory with intense, knife-edge focus, and she reaches now for the decorative blades on the walls, mementos that Erik had shaped from past victories and defeats, to remember what they were fighting for. Xavier’s telepathy presses over her like a heavy blanket, but she fights him off, making the fires of her mind rage hotter, fiercer, until he winces.

“Calm yourself, girl,” he says, a cool smile on his face. “We’re here to help.”

— ⓧ —

1975.

Her father doesn’t want her.

She lies in bed and screams. Her screams have the doctors wincing away with more-than-physical pain, her screams move the furniture. When she’s not screaming, she lies in bed and stares up the ceiling. Time passes slowly, like molasses dripping off her fingers. Time passes quickly, like hummingbirds in flight. She wants her mother. She wants her mother.

It’s during one of these spells when she’s staring at the ceiling and not doing anything in particular that she hears one of the doctors speaking to a woman outside her door. “I really don’t know what the CIA is planning to do in this case, Agent MacTaggart,” the doctor says, defensively. “But I’ll have you know I’ve heard the rumors, and though I don’t approve of what the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is doing, I won’t stand for—for the government taking some young girl and—and putting her through experiments—”

“No, no,” the woman says. “No. Nothing of the sort. I just… I think I know someone who can help her. Someone like her.”

“Is there anyone like her?” the doctor asks skeptically.

“His name is Erik Lehnsherr,” the woman says.

Jean closes her eyes and thinks no more of it until—

The door opens and closes. She screams at the person entering, but he stays silent, and her screams seem to bounce off his mind, off of walls he’s erected. She falls quiet out of surprise. Her scream usually rips through her sense of other people’s thoughts and feelings like wet tissue paper. Her interest piqued for the first time in days, she turns her head and watches as the man sits next to her. He has curly reddish hair and a kind smile.

“Hello, Jean,” he says.

She watches him and says nothing. He continues, “I know this must be difficult for you.”

“Do you?” she says through a throat scratchy from screaming. It’s the first thing she’s said in days. Anger burns in her, hot like a campfire, hot like a consuming flame. 

“I do. I lost my parents when I was not much older than you.” He rolls up his sleeve. There are numbers tattooed on his arm. “Do you know what this means?”

She shakes her head mutely. He smiles a little sadly. “I don’t know if that’s progress or not. It means… it means that when I was young, some people decided that I didn’t deserve to live because I wasn’t like them. Because I was different.” He rolls down his sleeve. “You’re different too, Jean, and it means some people will want to hurt you and keep you at a distance.”

“Like Dad,” she says.

“Yes,” the man says, and when she starts to cry, he opens his arms and she falls into them, hating him and grateful at the same time that _someone_ has finally told her what she did wrong. The man strokes her hair, like Dad does—like Dad _used to_ —he cards his fingers through his hair and hushes her, hands her a glass of water until she can stop crying. “But you’re not _alone_ in being different, Jean. There are other people like you. Like me,” he says, and he holds out his palm, and in it is a coin—and as she watches the coin floats up in the air—

Jean stares at him. She can do that, too.

“Are you a freak like me?” she whispers.

The man’s lips quirk. “Yes,” he says. “And I live with other freaks like us. Would you like to come live with us, Jean? Would you like to never be alone again?”

— ⓧ —

1980.

“How do you know about Mr. Erik?” she asks suspiciously.

“I’m the leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants, my dear,” Xavier says. “And I’m a telepath, like you. I have spies everywhere. Including in the government. I not only know that Erik was captured, I know where he is being held, and I know who has him—information that, if I’m not mistaken, whoever is leading your X-Men in the interim would quite like to know. So,” he smiles, and Jean shudders, “will you let me in?”

Jean hesitates, but—everyone’s been running around like headless chickens since Erik was taken, and for the first time in a long time, Jean is frightened that the man who saved her, who gave her a home here with the X-Men, which she plans to join when she’s old enough, might not come back.

She stands aside and lets Xavier wheel himself in. His lieutenants follow—Azazel with his tail whipping next to her hand on the doorknob, and she jumps backward, and he laughs—and the girl Storm watching her with cold, frozen eyes. Xavier is looking around, his lips pursed. “Honestly, Erik,” he says under his breath, “I know that interior decorating was never your forte, but this…”

Jean looks around at her home, at the minimalist metal furniture and the bare walls and bristles. “What do you know about it?” she says defensively.

Xavier smirks. “It’s my house, of course,” he says.

“It’s not,” Jean says sharply. “It’s ours.”

“My girl, the name on the deed says Charles Xavier and has since my mother and stepfather died,” Xavier says. “I am, technically, your landlord.”

“You’re a criminal and a terrorist and they don’t let criminals and terrorists own property,” Jean rebuts. Xavier throws his head back and laughs.

“She’s got you there,” Azazel mutters.

“We are wasting time,” Storm says, glancing around as though discomfited. “I don’t like this, X—”

“Your objections have been noted, Storm,” Xavier says. He turns to Jean. “Where are the X-Men, then?”

“They’re in the war room downstairs,” Jean says sullenly. “You can take the lift.”

That, at last, seems to startle Xavier from his damnable composure. “There’s a lift? There wasn’t a lift before.”

“Mr. Erik says it’s for a wheelchair,” Jean tells him, and watches as he—for once—opens his mouth and nothing comes out, at a total loss for words.

Xavier is in a wheelchair, she realizes. But—

Surely not. Why on earth would Erik build his home in such a way to accommodate the enemy? Even if this used to be Xavier’s home—even if he’s not _lying_ like a _liar_ just to throw her off guard—she wonders, for the first time, how Xavier and Erik know each other. Xavier speaks of Erik with such familiarity, like an old friend. “What are you doing here?” she says again. Why would the Brotherhood help their enemies find their kidnapped leader? What is he _doing_ here?

“It’s okay, Jean,” Alex says from where he’s stepped out of a hallway. “That’s _my_ question to ask.”

Xavier smiles. “Alex,” he says. “How lovely to see you again.”

Alex puffs his chest up, the way he does when he’s about to start shooting cosmic energy rays out of his chest. And Jean realizes—she might be a little out of her league.

— ⓧ —

1973.

Stryker’s had them for four weeks when the Brotherhood comes for them.

Alex sits in his cell, power-dampened and furious, and watches as the humans come for them, one by one. Toad already hasn’t returned. Ink’s skin is almost blacked-out from the tattoos they’ve been impressing onto his body. Alex sits, impotent and shackled, and has no recourse but to shout invective when Stryker enters, watching with a smirk as his boys are dragged out for experimentation and… god knows what else.

Alex has gone under the knife exactly once. He woke up exhausted and with stitches running all across his chest, where his powers stem from, and had shuddered at the imagined feeling of foreign hands poking at his organs, foreign eyes dissecting his body, waiting for him to croak so they can get their scalpels and their machines inside of him for _real_. He feels less than human, less than animal. He feels like a _thing_.

He’s almost too sunk into his own depression to notice the commotion rising up from outside the cells, the sounds of gunshots fired and men screaming. Almost.

He stands, presses his hands against the bars, and for a wild moment hopes that the X-Men have come for him—

And then in a puff of red smoke Azazel stands before him, grinning, twirling a ring of keys along his fingers. “An X-Man in a prison cell,” he taunts. “Whatever will they think of next?”

Alex fights him, of course, but he’s weak, and the others hold him back. “Man, he says he’s here to get us out,” Ink says, his grip on Alex’s shoulder like iron. There’s a fanatical, desperate light in Ink’s eyes that Alex doesn’t like.

“There are worse things than William Stryker,” Alex tries to tell them, but no one seems to believe him. He can’t even blame them. It’ll be years yet before the clashes between the Brotherhood and the X-Men become public knowledge. Already news is seeping into the mainstream consciousness, but they’ve been in ‘Nam for years, cut off from the news, not even granted the same leave as the human soldiers, and then they were here, in this laboratory where they’ve been cut open and tortured, inked and stained. Of course they go with Azazel. Of course.

Alex catches a glimpse of the carnage on the way out, and wants it to turn his stomach. It doesn’t.

Azazel brings them, of course, to Charles.

Charles looks good. In a wheelchair, but they knew that. His hair is neatly slicked back, his once-sparkling blue eyes cold as he looks them over and smiles, a terrible smile for that it’s so familiar to Alex, the same kind smile he’d given him when Alex had learned how to confine his cosmic rays to two targets instead of three. “Mutant soldiers,” he says, gently, harmlessly. Alex knows better. “I don’t suppose anyone has ever said this to you before, but… thank you. Thank you for your service.”

“Didn’t exactly have a lot of choice,” Vertigo grunts.

“Charles,” Alex says. The others turn to him in surprise. Alex doesn’t talk about his past, doesn’t talk about the X-Men. Doesn’t talk about Erik. Doesn’t talk about Charles. “Straight from one war to another, huh?” Because he knows. He knows what Charles will do next. He’ll take over their minds and use them as cannon fodder, their destructive capabilities turned to tearing down buildings in the middle of Columbus, blowing up schools in West Texas.

“Alex,” Charles greets him. “How lovely to see you again. But I fear your rage is misguided. I’m not William Stryker. I’m not the US government. I’m not like them.”

“You’re exactly like them,” Alex snaps, unable to take the bullshit any longer. “You steal mutants and use them for your own ends. You don’t care who gets caught in the crossfire as long as you can advance your agenda. You might be a mutant, but you’re just as bad as they are.”

Charles stares straight at him, but continues mildly, as though he hadn’t even heard. “You’re right, Sgt. Daniels. You weren’t given any sort of choice at all. Which is why I’m giving you one now. You don’t have to fight for me. You can walk away right now, turn you back on the rest of your mutant brothers and sisters, try to live normal lives. I won’t respect you any less. You have already given so much to this country, whether you planned to or not. Or you can come with me. You can put those skills to good use, fight for something you actually _believe_ in for once. You can fight to protect our kind. You can fight to tear down facilities like the one we found you in, make sure that no one ever suffers like you did again.” 

Ink hesitates. Claps Alex on the shoulder. “Summers,” he says gently. “Maybe you’re not always right.”

And Alex has to watch as the brothers he fought with, the brothers he suffered with, all take their places by Charles’s side. Not all of them. But enough.

Before Alex leaves, taking the three members of his squadron who had the sense not to join a _terrorist group_ with him, he turns back to Charles. Takes him in. The clothing that makes him look like a harmless eccentric professor. The neat hair and wheelchair and cold eyes. “You know what they call you, right?” he fires as one last parting shot. “The Brotherhood of _Evil_ Mutants.”

“You know what they say about evil, don’t you?” Charles parrots back. “That all that is required for it to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

“Is that what you still think of yourself as?” Alex asks. “A good man?”

Charles doesn’t say anything. Alex wins that round, but it feels like a loss, like Stryker has taken something from his chest and left a void there. A void where Charles used to live.

— ⓧ —

1980.

Alex shoos Jean away to go find Scott and Kurt while the adults do some talking. She gives him a dark glare but goes. He feels for her. He knows that she loves Erik too, that Erik has been like a father to her over the years, but she is a child, and it is not the place of children to hear what he has to say next.

Alex rounds on Charles when she’s gone. “Were you behind this?”

“Of course not,” Charles says simply. “I don’t give up mutants for experimentation by the US government simply because it would make my own life easier. And, believe me, getting Erik out of the picture would make my life _many_ times easier.”

“See,” Alex says, “it’s things like that which are the reason no one trusts you. That, and all the terrorism.”

Charles cocks his head. “You know that the girl is still listening from the stairs?”

“Jean,” Alex shouts. “Go!” He waits a moment, a little heartsore, for Charles to nod. His telepathy is so useful. They could’ve used a telepath around here, when Jean was sulking and not speaking to anyone for days, when Kurt’s time in the circus had left him mute but for whispered words to Raven and Erik. Except Charles has chosen to use his powers, not to help their kind, but to terrorize the humans. “Fine. If you didn’t take Erik, who did?”

“William Stryker,” Charles says gravely. “Your old friend.”

Alex leans against the doorjamb, covers his eyes with his arm, and swears. Charles gives him a moment to compose himself, which is more kindness than he’d thought Charles was capable of anymore.

“You see,” Charles says, “why time is of the essence.”

“Yeah, okay,” Alex says. “Okay. It’s not like you could make the situation any worse.”

Alex calls up the lift to the underground levels. Charles looks around mildly, but there’s a tension to the way he grips the armrests of his wheelchair that belies his indifference. Azazel enters after him, and Alex tenses—years of fighting the Brotherhood have primed him to be ready when he sees that red skin and whipping tail—but when Storm tries to enter, he bars the way. “No. Children aren’t allowed in the lower levels.”

“I’m not a child,” Storm snarls.

“I know who you are, Ororo Munroe,” he says. “You’re fifteen. You’re a child. Jean? Scott? Kurt?” He raises his voice, and sure enough, three heads poke out over the banister. “Keep Storm here company. And if any of them get hurt, I swear to God, Charles, I don’t care who you used to be, I will end your life.”

Storm looks pleadingly at Charles, who looks coldly angry, but nods. “Stay close,” he says. “I’ll need you later.”

She trudges up the stairs to meet the children, who are staring at her warily. Scott, ever the brave one, strides up to her and sticks out his hand. “Is it true you fight with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?” he asks.

Storm scowls and doesn’t shake his hand. Satisfied, Alex presses the button for -2 and braces for the most awkward elevator trip of his life.

“How’s Ink?” he asks after a moment.

“Dead,” Azazel says. Alex closes his eyes. No time to mourn, but he takes a moment anyway.

“The humans killed him,” Charles says.

“Yeah,” Alex scoffs. “The humans. Okay.”

He hears Hank’s rage before he sees it. Hank has cameras in the elevators, of course, which lock down whenever one of the children tries to sneak down here. Hank is roaring with fury. When the doors open, he bangs through, nearly denting the elevator doors, and slams into Azazel, a hand on his throat. It’s useless, of course—Azazel poofs down the hall. “What were you thinking?!” he snarls at Alex. “Letting him— _him_ —into our house, into our secrets?!”

“ _My_ house,” Charles says.

“You shut up before I forget that you’re in a wheelchair and rip you to shreds,” Hank snarls.

“By all means,” Charles says, “try,” and Hank—freezes.

Alex snarls. “Let him go.”

“The lab is this way, yes? The climate control will be better closer to the edges of the house.” And Charles wheels off, leaving Hank frozen, still as a statute, and Azazel trotting by his side. When he’s halfway down the hallway, Hank unfreezes, and before he can turn and run after Charles, rage in his eyes, Alex seizes him.

“I know, okay? I know. I know who he is, I know what he’s done. But we need him to find Erik, Hank.”

“He brought a _child soldier_ into this house!”

“I know,” Alex says, agonized. “I know. But he knows who took Erik. And you know we could use a telepath, Hank. Unless you’ve changed your mind about letting Jean in the field—”

“No,” Hank snarls. “We’re not—no. We’re better than that. Better than _him._ ”

Alex shrugs, a _then what?_ gesture that makes Hank slump, the rage draining out of him as abruptly as it came. “I don’t know what to do,” he whispers. “I wish Erik were here.”

“If Erik were here, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” Alex tells him, all tough love and truth, and steers him along to the lab. “Come on. We don’t want to leave Charles unattended for too long.”

Hank goes white underneath the fur. “Oh God,” he says. “Raven.”

They exchange looks and start running.

When they get to the lab, Raven is crying. Her hands are clenched into fists as she looks at Charles—not glares, merely looks—this is the first time she’s seen Charles since. Since Cuba. They’ve fought the Brotherhood plenty of times, but Charles is a puppetmaster, he doesn’t go out on the front lines. Sean is standing behind Raven, a protective arm around her shoulder to support her as she shakes.

Charles watches her back with an indescribable expression. “Raven,” he says.

“Charles,” she says back.

And something passes between them, some psychic signal, because Raven wipes roughly at her eyes and when she straightens all the emotions have drained from her face, just like Erik taught her. Charles looks away—he glances at the monitors, where Scott is trying to entertain Jean and Kurt by using his eye-beams to carve rude messages into the lawn, and Storm is standing off to the side, looking at them with pure confusion. A look flashes across Charles’s face, a lost look of uncertainty, before he regains himself and turns back to them.

“Having second thoughts about recruiting children, Charles?” Hank spits.

“You’ve been recruiting fairly young, yourself,” Charles says, nodding to the monitor.

“Jean’s father abandoned her. She’s Erik’s ward. Alex is Scott’s father. I rescued Kurt from the Munich circus and adopted him,” Raven says blankly, just a pure recitation of facts, no emotion. “The mutant commando team of X-Men are all adults.”

“Which is more than we can say for the Brotherhood,” Sean chimes in.

“Are you certain you want to stay and suffer this abuse?” Azazel asks Charles. Charles smiles tightly.

“Why are you really here, Charles?” Hank asks, exhaustion stretching his voice thin. Alex sympathizes. It is exhausting to hate someone you used to love. It is exhausting to see the ghost of your hopes wisp away in front of you.

Charles taps his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair, and, with a thrill, Alex realizes they are about to get a real answer. “I know,” Charles says softly, “that Erik fulfills an essential need in mutant society. I know what he does is important. The only extant mutant organization _cannot_ be the Brotherhood. The humans need the X-Men to look up to, to see that mutants are protecting them. I do want what is best for our people, in the end.”

That—that’s almost too much to process. Is Charles. Did Charles. Does he _know_ that what he’s doing is wrong? Is he doing it to give them a convenient villain to fight against, a scapegoat for the humans to redirect all of their hatred and fear towards? But before he can ask any of these things, before he can even glance at Hank and Raven to see if they’ve come to the same conclusion, Charles’s cold mask has fallen back over his face, and he looks at Hank, assessing, no trace of the man they’d once known in him once more. “We’ll need Cerebro.”

— ⓧ —

1964.

Moira finally gets them the rest of Hank’s things from the CIA compound, and Erik helps him sort through it. This is a task too difficult to ask the rest of the children to help with. Not children anymore, Erik considers. X-Men. There are some knick-knacks, memories of a kinder, gentler Hank. There are inventions and blueprints that, under Hank’s direction, Erik sorts into piles: keep, trash, destroy. Hank has learned well the lessons that there are some things you just shouldn’t meddle with. But there are astonishing things here. Upgrades for the plane that Hank had used to fly them to Cuba, including a stealth mode. Handheld scanning devices to detect medical abnormalities. Serums and satellites, formulas and fortresses.

And Cerebro.

Hank pauses over the blueprints. Moira had managed to destroy the previous iteration of Cerebro when Charles made a move on the CIA base in the hopes of capturing it, so the only remnants of its technological wonders are locked in Hank’s minds, and on this piece of paper. And Hank’s mind, while brilliant, is simply mutant. “If I destroyed this,” Hank said, “it might take me years to recreate it. I’ve been working on Cerebro since I was in college. It’s still not where I want it to be—ideally a non-telepath could hook up to it and use it, though not to the same extent.”

“Or a telepath could use it to control the world,” Erik says softly.

“Yes,” Hank says. “Or that.”

He looks at the designs for a long time, mourning, perhaps, and Erik lets him. He knows that Hank’s decision to stay was born, not out of any loyalty for Erik over Charles, not out of any moral code, but because of a self-loathing so deep it had turned into an affinity for humanity. Over the years, Erik hopes that he has helped Hank with that, that they have become friends. But he knows better than to believe it’s gone entirely.

Hank holds the plans in his hands and rips them to shreds.

When Erik meets his eyes, he says, “That’s too much power for any one person.”

Erik puts his hand on his shoulder, like he had years ago, and says, “You’ve changed.”

“Haven’t we all?” Hank asks.

— ⓧ —

1980.

In the end, it takes him a week and a half to rebuild Cerebro.

A week to draw up the plans; a half to assemble it. With Erik’s help, it might’ve been done in a day. As it is, the fabrication labs run overtime to assemble the psychic amplifiers. Azazel fixes them into place, using his teleportation to reach the higher vaults of the basement space where Cerebro is finding life once again. Charles stays in the mansion, much to everyone’s chagrin, and conducts Brotherhood business openly; not that they could stop him, given that he can speak into the mind of his spies from ten miles away. It’s a full-time job keeping the children away from Charles. They’re powerful; Charles would undoubtedly love to add them to his little collection of lost and missing children.

When it’s finished, Charles wheels into the platform built for him stretching into the center of Cerebro’s dome. Hank is wearing Erik’s anti-telepathic helmet, the only thing they recovered from the site Erik had been abducted from, ready to rip Charles’s throat out at the first sign that he might be using Cerebro for anything other than finding Erik. Charles lifts Cerebro’s helmet, a much sleeker version of the monstrosity he’d once had on his head before, and places it on his head.

They watch as Charles closes his eyes, as the panels around them turn from a cool blue to a deep red, as he focuses on every mutant mind, and then on one particular mutant mind. “Yes,” he says, to no one in particular. “Yes, I have you. We’re coming for you. Erik. Hold on.”

He opens his eyes, lifts the helmet off, looks at Hank, standing there, stiffly, in Erik’s helm. “Do take that off,” he says. “You look ridiculous, and we haven’t a moment to waste.”

— ⓧ —

1963.

Moira’s the one who brings them the news. Mutant children—the ones that Charles tracked down with Cerebro before he and Erik embarked on their road trip to find young adult mutants who would help them—have been going missing. Until Ororo Munroe, no one could prove it was Charles.

Erik stares at the photographic still of a man in a wheelchair, rolling up to the Munroes’ front door. That hair, those eyes—unmistakable.

Charles, collecting children. In another life, he might’ve opened a school. Kept them safe from the humans a different way.

Raven has been crying for the last forty-five minutes. Hank stormed off to do—whatever it is he does when he gets upset, and doesn’t want to unleash the Beast on everyone around him. Alex is rubbing at his face from where he sits across the table; Sean is staring out the window, for once not looking determinedly cheerful.

Erik is lost. Erik has _been_ lost for over a year now, adrift in a world that looks strange to him, purposeless, untethered, unanchored. He came back to the mansion because there was nowhere else to go, and because—and this sounds silly to him now—it was once Charles’s home, and it could be again. It was Charles’s property, if nothing else. Surely he knew they were still living there. Surely if he wanted to kick them out he could do it himself.

He came back to the mansion because he wanted to see Charles again, he acknowledges to himself quietly, and because if he couldn’t have that, he wanted to wrap himself in Charles’s ghost while he slept and dream of him.

“So what do we do now?” Sean asks him.

 _Why are you asking me?_ Erik wants to return, but he knows why. Because Charles had been their captain, but he had been Charles’s lieutenant, and in the absence—or desertion—of the captain, the lieutenant assumes command. Even Moira is looking at him expectantly.

They’ve had nothing. No purpose, since Shaw’s defeat. No enemy to fight, no reason to use the skills they’d developed together over one whirlwind month in September last year.

“We stop him,” Erik says.

It’s not a glorious origin story for the X-Men. But it is what happened.

— ⓧ —

1980.

Charles watches as the X-Children plead to be taken along and are summarily shut down, an inscrutable expression on his face.

For once, he comes with the Brotherhood into the field. He stays outside of the facility, but he keeps the X-Men and the Brotherhood linked, coordinates their movements, tells them when guards are moving in their direction. Leaving Cerebro behind without attempting to take control of the humans and erase all prejudice from their minds has won him some leeway in the eyes of the X-Men.

Unfortunate for them when he fails to warn them about an incoming contingent of guards flanking the party they’re sending to retrieve Erik. They’re poorly trained; he has no doubt that the X-Men will prevail without injury. But it gives Storm and Azazel time to fly to the center of the building, to the concrete cell where Erik is being held, collect him, and bring him to Charles.

The minds of the humans was never what he was after.

As the X-Men are engaged on the other side of the building, Azazel swirls into being before him, one hand on Erik’s shoulder, Erik’s other arm thrown around Storm as he struggles to stay upright. He looks exhausted. Bruises darken his face like shadows, and a collar pumping mutant gene suppression factor directly into his spinal canal is still around his neck. Charles can rifle through his memories of the last week and a half with ease, but he’s not sure he wants to. He got the gist of them when he was in Cerebro—experimentation, pain, _oh please God not again,_ wishing, praying for death. He doesn’t need to know more. He doesn’t want to know more.

“Charles,” Erik slurs out. Charles reaches out. Storm drags Erik closer to him, and Charles places a hand on his temple, and tells him, firmly, _Sleep._ Without pain or dreams. Erik’s eyes roll back into his head and Azazel catches him.

Charles nods at Azazel. By the time the X-Men catch up to where he was, they’re already gone.

— ⓧ —

1962.

It is over.

Thanks to Erik, Charles’s head is throbbing like a bastard, but that hardly matters. He stumbles onto the sand, falling onto his hands and knees, feeling the sand gritty against his skin, and breathes the air of a world free from Sebastian Shaw. Free of nuclear threat.

And then he hears it.

“Aim for the beach,” the captain of the USS Iowa is told from his direct line to Washington, while the Soviet fleet is receiving similar orders. But. _But._

But they _saved_ them. Both fleets from catastrophic battle; the world from nuclear war; everyone in a five hundred-mile radius from whatever Sebastian Shaw was planning to do with all that nuclear energy. Charles flails for purchase on the idea, on the _betrayal_ of it. _To end the mutant threat_ , he hears. “Moira,” he gasps. “Moira, get on the horn, tell them—tell them what we did—”

“What?” she’s asking, she doesn’t understand yet, and Charles rubs at his head, he can’t think, he can’t _concentrate._

 _“Tell them!_ Tell them we saved them, tell them that we’re not a threat to them—that we want what they want—”

“Charles, I don’t understand,” she says frantically, and of course she doesn’t. Moira has come to him with her concerns about Erik, about his desire for revenge, about him being a loose cannon, and Charles has defended him. Moira has heard him rant about the fears of humans and the way they will be scapegoated for what Shaw does and argued fiercely with him on behalf of the humans, on behalf of her own kind. Moira doesn’t know yet that he’s _right._ The CIA won’t protect them this time. The CIA is trying to _kill them._

So. It’s up to Charles.

He freezes every captain and struggles to his feet. “Brothers and sisters,” he says, glancing first at Raven, then at Erik where’s he climbing wearily out of the submarine, the helmet tucked under his arm, “today our fighting stops. The real enemy has revealed itself. The humans are turning their missiles against us. They plan to end the mutant threat, once and for all, on this shore. They don’t yet understand that we are the future, that they can kill us now and be faced with extinction anyway, that we offered them the hand of friendship and they are pointing a gun at us in return.”

“Charles,” Erik says softly, as he drifts over to him, “what are you doing?”

“Go ahead, Erik,” Charles says through a tight throat, “tell me I’m wrong.”

He can see the moment when Erik registers the direction the gunships have turned. When he feels their missiles being aimed and locked into position. “Charles,” Erik says desperately, “what do we do?”

Charles looks at Moira. “Can you stop them?”

Moira looks up anxiously from where she’s kneeling over the radio, her face white. It tells him everything he needs to know.

“Then we’ll give them what they want,” Charles says, “a war,” and he presses his fingers to his temple and at once the captain of every ship says, “Aim the missiles at the nearest boat,” and though he’s not projecting it must be clear the horror of what he’s about to do, because Hank cries out, “No, Charles!” and Raven screams, “Stop!” and he has to freeze them all. He has to keep them safe, not only from the humans but from the moral magnitude of this decision. He’s already been complicit in one murder today. What is thousands more? He feels shaky and his head pounds. He wants to be in bed with Erik, hearing the children move downstairs and knowing that he is not alone.

But he _is_ alone. He’s the only one who can do this, after all. The only one whose responsibility this is.

Charles closes his eyes, says, “Fire—”

And all the breath rushes out of him as someone tackles him. Erik, wearing that godawful helmet that had blocked Shaw from his influence—he must have put it on when Charles froze the others—and he gasps and loses control of the minds all around him. The others begin to move again. The captains of the ship, shaken, struggle with their commands. Some disarm the ships, sure that their judgment is compromised. Others aim the missiles at the beach again. “Can’t you feel it?” Charles shouts as he wrestles with Erik in the sand. “Can’t you feel the way you’ve doomed us all?!”

“I’ll stop them—Charles—stop—this isn’t you! You’re not a murderer, Charles! You’re better than that.”

“You weren’t,” Charles laughs, a laugh that turns into a sob.

“You’re better than _me_ ,” Erik cries out, and Charles flips him—Erik isn’t really fighting very hard any more—it’s more like they’re play-wrestling in bed—and Charles has his fingers curved under the helmet, is about to pull it off, and he knows from the look in Erik’s eyes that he’ll let him—

—when a hot line of fire catches across his spine—

—and he falls.

“No!” Erik shouts, horror lacing through his voice. “No! Moira—what have you done—”

 _Oh,_ Charles thinks. _Moira._ So intent on the threat Erik posed that he forgot the woman with the gun. Moira would laugh about that.

Moira gasps as the dog tags clench around her throat, but Charles, weary, hurting too much to control anyone’s mind right now and fully aware that there only hope is for exhausted, traumatized Erik to turn back the missiles, puts his hand on Erik’s and directs his attention back to him. “No,” he says. “She’s only… she’s only human, Erik. You don’t want to kill her. You don’t want to have a friend’s death on your conscience, too.”

Erik’s expression twists as he looks down at him. His face is shadowed by the helmet, and Charles wants to rip it off, but he barely has the strength to keep from screaming in agony. He realizes he is lying in Erik’s lap. Like it’s a summer day in the mansion and he’s blowing dandelion seeds into Erik’s face. “You were right,” Charles says dreamily. “You were right all along. They’ll never accept us, no matter what we do. We saved them. We saved them all. And they’re still aiming missiles at the beach.”

“No,” Erik says roughly. “No, I wasn’t, you’ve convinced me there’s a better way. Shaw had to die, but—before he went, he told me I was just like him, and—I don’t want to be. You’ve showed me that I can be better than that.”

“You can be,” Charles sighs. “Rage and serenity, Erik. The point between them—is love—and you have so much of it—you could do so much—”

“And you?” Erik says, his voice cracking, his eyes wet.

“Someone has to protect our kind,” Charles says. “Someone has to make the hard choices.”

His mind flickers out, touches the teleporter’s. Then the man who’d made whirlwinds from his hands, then Angel’s. And he finds in them belief. Belief in what he’s saying, belief in what Shaw had said—a crushing lack of surprise that the humans will go to such lengths to kill them that they’ll sacrifice their own and their heroes—Charles reaches out and says _Will you come?_ and each of them responds, _Yes._

“Erik,” he says, “leave me. Leave us. Let us do the work we have to do.”

“No,” Erik whispers wetly.

“Let me give you this,” Charles says. “Let me give you the chance to see what better looks like.”

Erik meets his eyes, and a long moment passes between them. The lingering taste of good-bye on the lips. Erik stands and backs away, his hand covering his eyes, and he turns back to the ocean as the missiles begin to fire—they hang in the air and he sends them up, away, with a wave of his hand, and Charles smiles. He has come so far.

The teleporter kneels beside him. He doesn’t extend the invitation to the others, for fear that they might actually come. “One day,” he tells them, “you’ll all see. But we’ll fight to keep that day from happening for as long as possible. To protect you from it.”

And then they’re gone, and a chapter of his life falls shut.

— ⓧ —

1980.

On the second day after Erik’s rescue, Charles uses his telepathy to check in on the X-Men, who are, indeed, still running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and then wheels himself to Erik’s room. Erik is sitting up in bed, shirtless save for the bandages wrapped around his ribs, and has submitted himself to Charles’s tender care. Charles brings him soup. He has a few doctors on staff, and all of them agree that Erik simply needs food, water, and rest to stop being so shaky on his feet, and then he can be released back to his cadre of do-gooders to put himself in harm’s way again for humans who will never know who they have to thank for their continued existence. 

This time, Charles brings the chessboard as well.

He lays it out in front of Erik, who looks at him suspiciously. He’s swapped out the inscrutable mask for the suspicious mask today. He’s only worn the two emotions the entire time Charles has had custody of him. “Dinnertime,” he says, and presses the bowl of soup into Erik’s hands. He sets up the chess game on the nightstand.

“Why am I still here?” Erik asks.

“Cracked ribs and the way in which you strained so hard against the suppression collar that you might have a permanent scar,” Charles says. “Black or white?”

“White. I meant, Hank is a doctor. He might even be better than the poor souls you’ve brainwashed into working for you.”

“Hank is a scientist and would use you to test out his new rib splints,” Charles says, annoyed bordering on fond. Erik shrugs. It’s true. 

“The point is—you don’t have to nurse me back to health yourself. You didn’t even have to help. Why did you?”

“That’s not the question I thought you’d be asking,” Charles says. He moves his knight in an opening move. Erik moves a pawn in return.

“What is the question you thought I’d be asking, then?”

“You don’t have your helmet,” Charles points out. “I could take over your mind at any time.”

“Hmm, that’s true,” Erik drops his soup spoon, lets it ring out against the metal bowl. “So why haven’t you?”

 _I love you,_ Charles doesn’t say, even though it’s true. Is still true. Is an answer to both questions. He moves his Queen instead to get out of the check Erik is setting up for his next turn.

“It’s still better than the question neither of us wants to ask,” Erik says. “Which is: what are you doing, Charles?”

He sounds totally baffled, even though it’s been eighteen years and surely he would’ve come up with his own explanations, however wrong, by now. Charles scowls and takes a rook with prejudice. “Do we have to do this now?”

“If not now, when?” Erik says mockingly. “The next time I see you again, eighteen years from now? Was Cuba that difficult for you, that you need thirty-six years to lick your wounds? Because believe me when I tell you it was a hell of a lot more difficult than me, and I didn’t try to start World War III _immediately afterward._ ”

“Don’t do this, Erik,” Charles says.

“Is it your legs? Is that what this is about? The humans took something from you, so you’re going to take everything from them?”

_“Don’t.”_

“Or is it just to get back at me? Because I _abandoned_ you? Yes, I know how you explain me away to your disciples. Alex still keeps in touch with some of his squadmates. But that’s not how it happened. You were the one with the principles and I was the one who would’ve done anything— _anything_ —to be with you!” Erik shouts.

“I know,” Charles says tightly, “I know, and—” And I couldn’t let you. You’d already given up twenty years of your life to hatred, I couldn’t let you give up the next twenty to love. 

Because here is the thing that Charles knows about Erik and the X-Men:

If he’d asked him—if he’d asked any of them, save maybe Raven—they would’ve come. They would have trusted him, or at least trusted their ability to talk him out of his principles, but Erik especially, and he couldn’t do that to him, not to any of them but especially not to Erik. Charles had been wrong on two counts that day; killing Shaw _had_ brought him peace. Had finally stripped something from him, some terrible burden, and the Erik that emerged from that submarine was softer, gentler, at last ready to live side-by-side with those who would hurt him, who would kill him, was ready to be the bigger man. That Erik was, at last, ready to be _good._ And Charles could not take that from him. Could not ask him to go back to being bad, because what they needed right now was bad, because light only shows up against a backdrop of darkness, because the world can only see how good Erik Lehnsherr is because they have Charles Xavier to compare him to.

That every victory Erik has ever won on behalf of mutants was in part won because of fear of the Brotherhood and the telepath at its helm, the knowledge that it could be so much worse than a heroic band of mutant commandos living together in a commune in Westchester. That the X-Men only exist because there is a Brotherhood to oppose them. That it has to be _real._ No collusion, no plotting, or the truth will out one day and turn the whole world against every one of them. That that means that Charles has not even this—not even stolen moments with Erik where they don’t argue with each other, not even a bowl of soup and a chess game.

“This was a mistake,” Charles murmurs. “I should go.”

“Maybe you should,” Erik says, but his eyes are keen and his mouth has softened. “Charles—we miss you, you know.”

“I can’t go back,” Charles whispers.

“Of course you can,” Erik says. “What do you think the ‘X’ in X-Men stands for?”

Charles stares at him. And then he flees.

— ⓧ —

When he returns later, the room is empty. All Erik has left is the bowl of soup, the spoon having been refashioned into an abstract metal sculpture of a man on horseback, or perhaps a centaur—a knight in shining armor, but made of dark metal, polished black. The chessboard is still set up, and the pieces are not where they were when he left.

And a note: _Your move._

**Author's Note:**

> [Librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata/pseuds/librata) is the best brainstorming partner and beta anyone could ask for. Title from "Two," by Helen Hunt Jackson.
> 
> Written for X-Salon's [AU April bingo](https://x-salon.tumblr.com/post/614323198809473024/): Reverse!verse. I have bingo! Come get me into trouble at [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com). If you like my work, buy me a coffee. And come join us on the [X-Men X-Traordinaire discord](https://discordapp.com/invite/7HyhZ5R)!
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


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